You can support 15 million people with a habitat requiring 3000 million metric tons of mass (if I got that right), or about 3 billion tons. (One could also ballpark that mass calculation, but I won't right now, just by thinking about a shell of six feet deep material with some surface area.)
The Earth weighs, as above, about 5 billion trillion imperial tons (close enough to metric tons). So, if we vandalized and vaporized the Earth to build space habitats (not that we know how yet), we could build a trillion space habitats that each support 15 million people. Or, that would be about 15 billion billion people, or about a billion times more people than the Earth supports now. I have not double checked that, but it sounds more or less right within a thousand or so.:-)
Anyway, while I don't recommend disassembling the Earth to make way for a space habitat(or hyperspace) bypass, as there are plenty of asteroids and moons in the solar system that are easier to use for mass, and it makes sense to preserve Earth as a historical landmark to our past, this points out that people like William Catton who are spouting imminent danger from "overpopulation" are more just lacking basic math skills and some imagination.:-)
"[p2p-research] Earth's carrying capacity and Catton" http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
"Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr." http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954 Contrast with someone who though the empowered human imagination was the ultimate resource: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
These calculations have life-and-death consequences as relate to human wars and decisions about having children or abortions. Seriously. Whether someone is stockpiling ammo for the "overpopulation die-off" or trying to get a job at NASA or private or volunteer efforts to build space habitats or even just design better solar panels hinges on this sort of basic math.
The consequences that flow from this simple calculation about the weight of the Earth and the weight of a space habitat in comparison are politically profound. They suggest we should not be fighting over oil as a form of dogma-driven collective "suicide" but instead should be putting a lot of time and effort in developing a serious space program and other advanced technology, but from an abundance paradigm where the wealth is widely shared, not a scarcity paradigm where wealth is tightly hoarded. See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based ap
I'd add "order of magnitude estimation" to that list, becuase I find it regularly useful to make ballpark guesses about various issues. So, being able to do something like this, just to make something up as a calculation of the mass of the Earth:
The Earth is about 8000 miles across, but let's call it 10,000 in round numbers. It's a sphere, but if it were a cube, it would have a volume of 10K time 10K time 10K, or about 1,000,000,000,000 cubic miles. A mile is about 5000 feet, so a cubic mile is about 75,000,000,000 cubic feet, or about 100 billion cubic feet in round numbers. A bag of dirt is about a cubic foot and weighs about 40 pounds, but lets call it 100 pounds in round numbers and accounting for rock. So a cubic mile of Earth weighs about 10,000 billion pounds. So, the Earth weighs about 10 thousand billion trillion pounds. Or about 5 billion trillion tons.
Anyway, while that's a complicated calculation, and with big rounding errors in various places (compressed molten rock must weigh quite a bit more than topsoil since I rounded up a bunch), the more people who can do that sort of thing, the more people can make sense of a lot of public policy issues like comparing NASA's budget to the DOD budget, or understanding the amount of the economy goint to social security relative to education, or guessing how feasible some technical proposal is, and so on. The devil is in the details, of course, but order of magnitude estimation at least can put a sort of ballpark fence around the details. I used just facts I knew (diameter of the Earth, weight of a bag of soil) without precise details to get close. Often, in public policy, close is all you need to have a feel for the basics of a situation and to fact check what you are being told.
Education can have several goals in this descending order: * To help a person grow as a person * To help a person be a good citizen * To shape a person into someone elses' vision of a good consumer and good worker and, for a few, a good obedient professional with the "right" politics
Those three aspects of "education" are regularly confused, and usually most of formal schooling (especially when test-driven) has to do with the last of the three which is often at odds with the first two.
Or without some other changes... Space habitats, a move to virtual reality, the development of solar power or cold fusion, a voluntary change in lifestyle to forcus on the spiritual or the material, and so on. It does not have to be a gloomy change as some like Catton might suggest.
I agree with you on your general point though on knowing about exponential growth. Einstein talked about that, as have others (Amara, Kurzweil, Moravec, etc.)
But basically, most young children tend to learn best through interactions with people, nature, exposure to a waide variety of experiences including music and stories, and basic things like playing with sand, water, and blocks. It is on those sorts of things that more advanced thinking is built. Trying to put the cart before the horse may lead to less success, not more. It has been hypothesized that the reason many kids are doing worse in math and science and criticial thinking is that those sorts of general early experiences have been curtailed in favor of early academics focusing on things like early print literacy or early drill of math concepts. So, you might want to research this more, including reading stuff by John Holt (a mathematical person who also studied alternative education). http://holtgws.com/
With that said, there are things you can do, like pointing out things. I've pointed out examples of recursion to my kid from a young age (like trucks carrying trucks). And math has been a daily thing by pointing out examples of it in our daily life, including when working with LEGOs. But that is not the same as "lessons" in any kind of formal sense.
I agree with you that programming is a good way to approach math. As people talked about on the Python edusig list, "math" can really just be seen as a subset of computation and programming in general (at least within the bounds of whatever most schools teach).
I can also wonder if getting kids indoors more at an early age has made them vitamin D deficient which has led to some learning difficulties? So, even if you use computers with a kid a lot, make sure that everyone is getting enough vitamin D. http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools "When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools by Peter Gray; In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more.... The school that Kenschaft visited happened to be in a very poor district, with mostly African American kids, so at first she figured that the worst teachers must have been assigned to that school, and she theorized that this was why African Americans do even more poorly than white Americans on math tests. But then she went into some schools in wealthy districts, with mostly white kids, and found that the mathematics knowledge of teachers there was equally pathetic. She concluded that nobody could be learning much math in school and, "It appears that the higher scores of the affluent districts are not due to superior teaching but to the supplementary informal 'home schooling' of children.""
For the record, I've always loved math and think it can be a very fun and worthwhile profession or hobby. I love broccoli too, but forcefeeding endless amounts of it to people till bursting despite the tears and protests would be cruel and probably would result in them not eating broccoli when no one was looking. How do we get people to enjoy thinking well and eating healthy? Good question. But people do have answers, if you look. http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Something we all might benefit from: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1 "Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such FOSS "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security....
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete....
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."
Otherwise, our military-intelligence-industrial-prison-schooling system is just ironic: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
Thanks for the informative post. Wish I had mod points.
Some of this a boot speed improvement might have to do with the nature of the overall architecture of a central CPU. When people boot a computer, they would like the thing to be immediately responsive. If there was a sort of bus that related to your primary display and core computing services that was independent of the rest, then you could get instant responsiveness (like a calculator) even if the rest of the system took a while to come up to speed. For example, how long would it take to boot a diskless X Terminal that then talked to the rest of a system? So, it would need to be layered, with your Commodore 64 like thing at the core, and then these other things at the periphery.
I so wish IBM had gone with Forth instead of DOS as the OS for the early PC (and it had at least one in-house at the time).
Also, what do you think of this? http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot "coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers. It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload.... Fast boot times (3 seconds to Linux console)"
However, that includes land costs, so you may have a US$100K house on a million dollar piece of land. So the rebuilding cost is probably only, guessing, US$10 trillion?
Of course, that is only residential real estate. There is a suggestion there that all commercial real estate comes to around US$3.7 trillion. Again, some of that is probably land, so let's guess $2 trillion to rebuild, or adding the two, about US$12 trillion in costs to rebuild every building we have now.
And as in my other reply, we can probably guess it is around US$7 trillion total now as a minimum. But it may be higher with hidden costs, including interest on the national debt and opportunity costs. What if that money had gone into medical research instead? Or robotics? Or green energy? Or biotech? Or what about all the social energy that has gone into prosesting against nuclear militarism and a MAD policy?
So, certainly, by that estimate, the US nuclear weapons program has cost more or less enough to rebuild everything once. As for rebuilding twice, in that nuclear cost, I'm not sure it includes interest on that money had it been invested. So, it may be a simple addition of all the costs, not any consideration of what it means to spend money way back then as far as returns on investment. Also, when I read that, it was probably twenty years ago, so the ratio may have been different.
Certainly the orders of magnitude are comparable, even if it depends on exact natures of the estimates.
Thanks for questioning this. I hope you look into it more for yourself.:-)
Obviously, then there is the cost of the roadways, industrial infrastructure, and contents of all that. So, the cost of rebuilding absolutely everything in the USA might be more. But, it is still ironic that the "insurance" against losing everything in the USA to the "communists" has been... about the cost of everything in the USA.:-)
Oops, you are right, thanks for catching that. Poor choice of source there, even as the basic scale is right (since that is apparently for just one year, and they total the whole year at US$16.5 billion) and in my haste I though they were talking about the total costs and the ballpark was close. So, the total is going to be more like 100 time that.
I've seen higher figures too (What about clean up costs? What about cancer costs? What about interest on those costs incurred as national debt? What about lots of other hidden costs? Etc.)
So, add another fourteen years on to that $5.5 trillion estimate (which may be low, and not include interest) and you'd probably get, say, seven trillion dollars for the total cost of the US. So, the cost to California, base on being 13% of the population, would then be about $900 billion for the total cost of the weapons program, not including interest on past expenses (or interest paid on military-related debt that was never funded by taxes).
So, US$900 billion is only about approaching half of the two trillion dollar figure I cited. So, I'm still in the ballpark, even as you were right to point out I missed several decimal points by a poor choice of data source which I misinterpreted as total costs, not one years cost -- I guess, luckily, my two mistakes just about cancelled out.:-) But I might have noticed it if the figure was not about what I remembered from other sources.
Glad someone around here is double checking calculations and posting about it.:-) Thanks again. Sorry about the sloppy math.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml "Research indicates it will help several vitamin D deficiency-associated diseases such as: autism, autoimmune illness, cancer, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, heart disease, hyperparathyroidism, hypertension, influenza, myopathy (neuromuscular disorders), and osteoporosis...."
One problem with all this technology is it keeps us indoor more and so we become vitamin D deficient...
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity. http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Basically, many researchers keep looking for a magic bullet they can patent, but overlook the basics they can't patent (like vegetables&fruits&legumes, exercise, sleep, meditation, humor, friendships, dogs, a clean environment, good work, peace of mind, etc.)
Or maybe we should build better systems to empower regular users towards a more "transparent society" like David Brin talks about and an improved collective IQ like Doug Engelbart talks about?
Or, as I said here about intelligence tools, but would apply equally well with a fascistic/plutocratic binding together of corporations and governance like is increasingly the norm in the USA: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319 "Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
"I salute you. Not sure how meta you were trying to be, but I am grinning."
Glad someone else around here gets my jokes.:-)
I'm not sure either how meta I was trying to be.:-)
===
On your other point, I don't have much advice about women, and of course, men being around women tends to lead to kids which is a whole other issue.:-)
If you can practice the things Morton Deutsch talks about, you will probably find more healthy relationships of all sorts than you have time for.:-)
Milton Mayeroff's "On Caring" is also worth reading, about how it is caring and being cared for (in all sorts of relationships with all sorts of different relationships) that matters more to feeling at home in the universe than understanding, possessing, and so on: http://www.auuf.net/about-auuf/sermons/71-caring-sermon
The more people you interact with in a healthy way, the more likely you'll have good relationships of all sorts. There was some advice on basic conversation that says, talk with everyone, as you are improving your conversation skills, and you also never know who (someone's grandmother?) might connect you to someone else if they think you are a likeable sort (that is not to say to be ungenuine -- just to say to be out there interacting with the world in positive ways). Of course, you can pick where you spend a lot of your time: http://www.idealist.org/
And stuff on life's ups and down and how even the down times are valuable:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC "Every human life is made up of the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the vital and the deadening. How you think about this rhythm of moods makes all the difference. Are you going to hide out in self-delusion and distracting entertainments? Are you going to become cynical or depressed? Or are you going to open your heart to a mystery that is as natural as the sun and the moon, day and night, and summer and winter?"
And a lot of human interpersonal reactions have nothing to do with formal logic or politics, but with things like pheromones related to maximizing genetic diversity for disease resistance in offspring.:-) Or, from another angle, happiness in relationships also depends on many small things, as my undergrad adviser told me, if you like to sleep with the window open, and your wife likes to sleep with the window shut, you two are never going to be happy. But, as someone else told me (someone in the military, by the way:-), love is about working through those kind of things, so maybe my adviser was wrong about that specific thing, even as his point in general is true that little things make a big difference?
Another thing is that people change over time, even as relationships may endure. To an extent, a relationship is somewhat a separate thing than the people in it.
It says somewhere on the CIA public website (or used to) essentially that if you are applying for a job there, you should not tell anyone. I guess, the first rule of the CIA is no one works there, except Valery Plame.:-) But the CIA suggests that in part for the reasons you imply, as it can presumably make people a target (although it also would complicated covert things). Of course, who is not a target in some way in this world? Things become an issue of "risk management", like so much in life. It's unfortunate that the US has such an organization that mixes up sensemaking, spying, and covert operations. I think a "COIA" (Central Open Intelligence Agency?) that just worked in public would be much more effective for US security.:-) Maybe to complement the "Department of Peace" Dennis Kucinich and others have worked towards?:-) Although various different agencies and parts of agencies all do part of that task, but there may be poor integration of all that. And, of course, nothing is going to work right as long as our economic religion is so messed up (and a top priority has to be rethinking economics for the 21st century so it stops being primarily a faith-based dogmatic religion that denies it is a religion.:-) Related:
"The Market as God" http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
As to me and my funding, under our current socioeconomic paradigm, I'm right now mostly one step above Kryten as a toilet-scrubbing homeschooling stay-at-home Dad, supported by a wife doing data-analysis consulting for "civilian" corporations these days, where my hobbies include developing FOSS software, writing long essays like this that hardly anyone reads, taking care of three elderly chickens, and taking part in a global "Blessed Unrest" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ towards saving a world that, way more often than not, is uninterested in being saved from its own internal contradictions and ironies. A world going mad from simple things like vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and legumes: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Best job I ever had.:-)
But if the CIA came along and offered me a big grant to do publicly available FOSS Intelligence software and related content, would I ask my wife to do even more of the homeschooling and chicken care than she does already, or maybe even hire a multilingual tutor for some of the time and/or buy a toilet scrubbing robot? Probably.:-) How's that for ethics?:-) Would I rather such work was funded some other way? Sure. We tried a bit and failed with the NSF and NASA: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Maybe we did not try hard enough perhaps... I have to admire these Concord people for their success and doing stuff mostly the right way (at least, as right as you can be if focused mostly on the needs of compulsory schools): http://www.concord.org/
Politics and FOSS can make strange bedfellows. A few years ago there was a slashdot story on someone doing FOSS who lost a military-related contract after he said he took military money because it meant one less cruise missile or something. But he was right in a way. Imagine what some FOSS developers could do with the time otherwise made available by the money tied up in just one Tomahawk cruise missile (US$6
Slashdot Mirror
The weight of the Earth comes in useful in calculating how many space habitats you could build from it. :-)
Let's see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Space_habitat
http://ramblingsonthefutureofhumanity.blogspot.com/2009/10/designing-space-habitat.html
You can support 15 million people with a habitat requiring 3000 million metric tons of mass (if I got that right), or about
3 billion tons. (One could also ballpark that mass calculation, but I won't right now, just by thinking about a shell of six feet deep material with some surface area.)
The Earth weighs, as above, about 5 billion trillion imperial tons (close enough to metric tons). So, if we vandalized and vaporized the Earth to build space habitats (not that we know how yet), we could build a trillion space habitats that each support 15 million people. Or, that would be about 15 billion billion people, or about a billion times more people than the Earth supports now. I have not double checked that, but it sounds more or less right within a thousand or so. :-)
Anyway, while I don't recommend disassembling the Earth to make way for a space habitat(or hyperspace) bypass, as there are plenty of asteroids and moons in the solar system that are easier to use for mass, and it makes sense to preserve Earth as a historical landmark to our past, this points out that people like William Catton who are spouting imminent danger from "overpopulation" are more just lacking basic math skills and some imagination. :-)
"[p2p-research] Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
"Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr."
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954
Contrast with someone who though the empowered human imagination was the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
These calculations have life-and-death consequences as relate to human wars and decisions about having children or abortions. Seriously. Whether someone is stockpiling ammo for the "overpopulation die-off" or trying to get a job at NASA or private or volunteer efforts to build space habitats or even just design better solar panels hinges on this sort of basic math.
The consequences that flow from this simple calculation about the weight of the Earth and the weight of a space habitat in comparison are politically profound. They suggest we should not be fighting over oil as a form of dogma-driven collective "suicide" but instead should be putting a lot of time and effort in developing a serious space program and other advanced technology, but from an abundance paradigm where the wealth is widely shared, not a scarcity paradigm where wealth is tightly hoarded. See also my essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based ap
Good catch. You're right, that is an error in my math of cubing 5 as an incorrect 75 and not the correct 125.
Still close though. :-)
Maybe we should mostly teach kids how to use the free equivalent (someday) of Wolfram Alpha?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5+*+5+*+5
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5+cubed
Of course, that might make it too easy to take things completely on faith: :-)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weight+of+the+earth
"5.9742×10^24 kg"
You're right!
The "Mechanical Universe" includes an animation of rocket with velocity and acceleration graphs: http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html
I'd add "order of magnitude estimation" to that list, becuase I find it regularly useful to make ballpark guesses about various issues. So, being able to do something like this, just to make something up as a calculation of the mass of the Earth:
The Earth is about 8000 miles across, but let's call it 10,000 in round numbers. It's a sphere, but if it were a cube, it would have a volume of 10K time 10K time 10K, or about 1,000,000,000,000 cubic miles. A mile is about 5000 feet, so a cubic mile is about 75,000,000,000 cubic feet, or about 100 billion cubic feet in round numbers. A bag of dirt is about a cubic foot and weighs about 40 pounds, but lets call it 100 pounds in round numbers and accounting for rock. So a cubic mile of Earth weighs about 10,000 billion pounds. So, the Earth weighs about 10 thousand billion trillion pounds. Or about 5 billion trillion tons.
Let's check how close I got? :-)
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/planet-earth-weigh.htm
6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6E+24) kilograms.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds (so, a little low if divided by 2.2)
10,000 * 1,000,000,000 * 1,000,000,000,000
Pretty close! :-)
Anyway, while that's a complicated calculation, and with big rounding errors in various places (compressed molten rock must weigh quite a bit more than topsoil since I rounded up a bunch), the more people who can do that sort of thing, the more people can make sense of a lot of public policy issues like comparing NASA's budget to the DOD budget, or understanding the amount of the economy goint to social security relative to education, or guessing how feasible some technical proposal is, and so on. The devil is in the details, of course, but order of magnitude estimation at least can put a sort of ballpark fence around the details. I used just facts I knew (diameter of the Earth, weight of a bag of soil) without precise details to get close. Often, in public policy, close is all you need to have a feel for the basics of a situation and to fact check what you are being told.
People know how to do better: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
We don't for all sorts fo reasons related to social power (see John Taylor Gatto).
See also my essay on learning "on demand" instead of learning "just in case":
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Education can have several goals in this descending order:
* To help a person grow as a person
* To help a person be a good citizen
* To shape a person into someone elses' vision of a good consumer and good worker and, for a few, a good obedient professional with the "right" politics
Those three aspects of "education" are regularly confused, and usually most of formal schooling (especially when test-driven) has to do with the last of the three which is often at odds with the first two.
See also for how the third aspect goes on into grad school:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
Or without some other changes... Space habitats, a move to virtual reality, the development of solar power or cold fusion, a voluntary change in lifestyle to forcus on the spiritual or the material, and so on. It does not have to be a gloomy change as some like Catton might suggest.
I agree with you on your general point though on knowing about exponential growth. Einstein talked about that, as have others (Amara, Kurzweil, Moravec, etc.)
For more of the history of school: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
A key section is here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto-uhae-16.html
as part of another archive:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto-arch.html
You may just have had an advantage from natural talent and experience? Or maybe you just eat a better diet or exercise more than others?
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
You can see another post I made for links about alternative education.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34081206
But basically, most young children tend to learn best through interactions with people, nature, exposure to a waide variety of experiences including music and stories, and basic things like playing with sand, water, and blocks. It is on those sorts of things that more advanced thinking is built. Trying to put the cart before the horse may lead to less success, not more. It has been hypothesized that the reason many kids are doing worse in math and science and criticial thinking is that those sorts of general early experiences have been curtailed in favor of early academics focusing on things like early print literacy or early drill of math concepts. So, you might want to research this more, including reading stuff by John Holt (a mathematical person who also studied alternative education).
http://holtgws.com/
With that said, there are things you can do, like pointing out things. I've pointed out examples of recursion to my kid from a young age (like trucks carrying trucks). And math has been a daily thing by pointing out examples of it in our daily life, including when working with LEGOs. But that is not the same as "lessons" in any kind of formal sense.
A good open-ended site for young kids to learn through play as an example:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
I agree with you that programming is a good way to approach math. As people talked about on the Python edusig list, "math" can really just be seen as a subset of computation and programming in general (at least within the bounds of whatever most schools teach).
I can also wonder if getting kids indoors more at an early age has made them vitamin D deficient which has led to some learning difficulties? So, even if you use computers with a kid a lot, make sure that everyone is getting enough vitamin D.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools ... The school that Kenschaft visited happened to be in a very poor district, with mostly African American kids, so at first she figured that the worst teachers must have been assigned to that school, and she theorized that this was why African Americans do even more poorly than white Americans on math tests. But then she went into some schools in wealthy districts, with mostly white kids, and found that the mathematics knowledge of teachers there was equally pathetic. She concluded that nobody could be learning much math in school and, "It appears that the higher scores of the affluent districts are not due to superior teaching but to the supplementary informal 'home schooling' of children.""
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools by Peter Gray; In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more.
See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
And some posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):
* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.htm
* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
For the record, I've always loved math and think it can be a very fun and worthwhile profession or hobby. I love broccoli too, but forcefeeding endless amounts of it to people till bursting despite the tears and protests would be cruel and probably would result in them not eating broccoli when no one was looking. How do we get people to enjoy thinking well and eating healthy? Good question. But people do have answers, if you look.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Great example.
Related usages, searching on a bit of that text:
http://www.google.com/search?q=When+he+tired+of+official+reports+and+memoranda+and+minutes%2C+he+would+plug+his+foolscap-sized+Newspad+into+the+ship's+information+circuit
Something we all might benefit from: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1 ... ...
"Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such FOSS "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security.
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."
Otherwise, our military-intelligence-industrial-prison-schooling system is just ironic:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
Rare earths were mentioned by me as an issue here as why "democratic resource-based planning" is important to deal with market failures: :-)
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
As are also a gift economy, a basic income, and stronger local subsistence economies.
Thanks for the informative post. Wish I had mod points.
Some of this a boot speed improvement might have to do with the nature of the overall architecture of a central CPU. When people boot a computer, they would like the thing to be immediately responsive. If there was a sort of bus that related to your primary display and core computing services that was independent of the rest, then you could get instant responsiveness (like a calculator) even if the rest of the system took a while to come up to speed. For example, how long would it take to boot a diskless X Terminal that then talked to the rest of a system? So, it would need to be layered, with your Commodore 64 like thing at the core, and then these other things at the periphery.
And how fast does it take OpenBoot to bring up a Forth prompt?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
I so wish IBM had gone with Forth instead of DOS as the OS for the early PC (and it had at least one in-house at the time).
Also, what do you think of this? ... Fast boot times (3 seconds to Linux console)"
http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot
"coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers. It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload.
According to this it would cost about US$23 trillion to buy all residential real estate: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=493795
However, that includes land costs, so you may have a US$100K house on a million dollar piece of land. So the rebuilding cost is probably only, guessing, US$10 trillion?
Of course, that is only residential real estate. There is a suggestion there that all commercial real estate comes to around US$3.7 trillion. Again, some of that is probably land, so let's guess $2 trillion to rebuild, or adding the two, about US$12 trillion in costs to rebuild every building we have now.
The total cost listed here as a *minimum* is $5.8 trillion dollars through the mid 1990s: http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_atomic_audit.html
And as in my other reply, we can probably guess it is around US$7 trillion total now as a minimum. But it may be higher with hidden costs, including interest on the national debt and opportunity costs. What if that money had gone into medical research instead? Or robotics? Or green energy? Or biotech? Or what about all the social energy that has gone into prosesting against nuclear militarism and a MAD policy?
So, certainly, by that estimate, the US nuclear weapons program has cost more or less enough to rebuild everything once. As for rebuilding twice, in that nuclear cost, I'm not sure it includes interest on that money had it been invested. So, it may be a simple addition of all the costs, not any consideration of what it means to spend money way back then as far as returns on investment. Also, when I read that, it was probably twenty years ago, so the ratio may have been different.
Certainly the orders of magnitude are comparable, even if it depends on exact natures of the estimates.
Thanks for questioning this. I hope you look into it more for yourself. :-)
Obviously, then there is the cost of the roadways, industrial infrastructure, and contents of all that. So, the cost of rebuilding absolutely everything in the USA might be more. But, it is still ironic that the "insurance" against losing everything in the USA to the "communists" has been ... about the cost of everything in the USA. :-)
Oops, you are right, thanks for catching that. Poor choice of source there, even as the basic scale is right (since that is apparently for just one year, and they total the whole year at US$16.5 billion) and in my haste I though they were talking about the total costs and the ballpark was close. So, the total is going to be more like 100 time that.
From:
http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_atomic_audit.html
"The amount spent through 1996--$5.5 trillion--was 29 percent of all military spending from 1940 through 1996 ($18.7 trillion)."
I've seen higher figures too (What about clean up costs? What about cancer costs? What about interest on those costs incurred as national debt? What about lots of other hidden costs? Etc.)
So, add another fourteen years on to that $5.5 trillion estimate (which may be low, and not include interest) and you'd probably get, say, seven trillion dollars for the total cost of the US. So, the cost to California, base on being 13% of the population, would then be about $900 billion for the total cost of the weapons program, not including interest on past expenses (or interest paid on military-related debt that was never funded by taxes).
So, US$900 billion is only about approaching half of the two trillion dollar figure I cited. So, I'm still in the ballpark, even as you were right to point out I missed several decimal points by a poor choice of data source which I misinterpreted as total costs, not one years cost -- I guess, luckily, my two mistakes just about cancelled out. :-) But I might have noticed it if the figure was not about what I remembered from other sources.
Glad someone around here is double checking calculations and posting about it. :-) Thanks again. Sorry about the sloppy math.
The deeper problem is our artificial-scarcity-based economic paradigm is increasingly obsolete: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
My site on the problem: http://artificialscarcity.com/
Alternative solutions collected by me: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml ..."
"Research indicates it will help several vitamin D deficiency-associated diseases such as: autism, autoimmune illness, cancer, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, heart disease, hyperparathyroidism, hypertension, influenza, myopathy (neuromuscular disorders), and osteoporosis.
One problem with all this technology is it keeps us indoor more and so we become vitamin D deficient...
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.
What are we really defending here?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
My comment on another article: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1692444&cid=32644166
Basically, many researchers keep looking for a magic bullet they can patent, but overlook the basics they can't patent (like vegetables&fruits&legumes, exercise, sleep, meditation, humor, friendships, dogs, a clean environment, good work, peace of mind, etc.)
Examples:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
Or maybe we should build better systems to empower regular users towards a more "transparent society" like David Brin talks about and an improved collective IQ like Doug Engelbart talks about?
Or, as I said here about intelligence tools, but would apply equally well with a fascistic/plutocratic binding together of corporations and governance like is increasingly the norm in the USA:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
"I salute you. Not sure how meta you were trying to be, but I am grinning."
Glad someone else around here gets my jokes. :-)
I'm not sure either how meta I was trying to be. :-)
===
On your other point, I don't have much advice about women, and of course, men being around women tends to lead to kids which is a whole other issue. :-)
And of course, be careful what you wish for. :-)
"Bedazzled Trailer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xUnFbyqNr4
And then there is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Parents
But I can tell you Morton Deutsch has good advice about relationships in general:
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
http://www.forums.alliance21.org/d_read/pax/articles/Deutsch.htm
If you can practice the things Morton Deutsch talks about, you will probably find more healthy relationships of all sorts than you have time for. :-)
Milton Mayeroff's "On Caring" is also worth reading, about how it is caring and being cared for (in all sorts of relationships with all sorts of different relationships) that matters more to feeling at home in the universe than understanding, possessing, and so on:
http://www.auuf.net/about-auuf/sermons/71-caring-sermon
The more people you interact with in a healthy way, the more likely you'll have good relationships of all sorts. There was some advice on basic conversation that says, talk with everyone, as you are improving your conversation skills, and you also never know who (someone's grandmother?) might connect you to someone else if they think you are a likeable sort (that is not to say to be ungenuine -- just to say to be out there interacting with the world in positive ways). Of course, you can pick where you spend a lot of your time:
http://www.idealist.org/
And stuff on life's ups and down and how even the down times are valuable:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Every human life is made up of the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the vital and the deadening. How you think about this rhythm of moods makes all the difference. Are you going to hide out in self-delusion and distracting entertainments? Are you going to become cynical or depressed? Or are you going to open your heart to a mystery that is as natural as the sun and the moon, day and night, and summer and winter?"
And a lot of human interpersonal reactions have nothing to do with formal logic or politics, but with things like pheromones related to maximizing genetic diversity for disease resistance in offspring. :-) Or, from another angle, happiness in relationships also depends on many small things, as my undergrad adviser told me, if you like to sleep with the window open, and your wife likes to sleep with the window shut, you two are never going to be happy. But, as someone else told me (someone in the military, by the way :-), love is about working through those kind of things, so maybe my adviser was wrong about that specific thing, even as his point in general is true that little things make a big difference?
Another thing is that people change over time, even as relationships may endure. To an extent, a relationship is somewhat a separate thing than the people in it.
Also, if you wo
It says somewhere on the CIA public website (or used to) essentially that if you are applying for a job there, you should not tell anyone. I guess, the first rule of the CIA is no one works there, except Valery Plame. :-) But the CIA suggests that in part for the reasons you imply, as it can presumably make people a target (although it also would complicated covert things). Of course, who is not a target in some way in this world? Things become an issue of "risk management", like so much in life. It's unfortunate that the US has such an organization that mixes up sensemaking, spying, and covert operations. I think a "COIA" (Central Open Intelligence Agency?) that just worked in public would be much more effective for US security. :-) Maybe to complement the "Department of Peace" Dennis Kucinich and others have worked towards? :-) Although various different agencies and parts of agencies all do part of that task, but there may be poor integration of all that. And, of course, nothing is going to work right as long as our economic religion is so messed up (and a top priority has to be rethinking economics for the 21st century so it stops being primarily a faith-based dogmatic religion that denies it is a religion. :-) Related:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
As to me and my funding, under our current socioeconomic paradigm, I'm right now mostly one step above Kryten as a toilet-scrubbing homeschooling stay-at-home Dad, supported by a wife doing data-analysis consulting for "civilian" corporations these days, where my hobbies include developing FOSS software, writing long essays like this that hardly anyone reads, taking care of three elderly chickens, and taking part in a global "Blessed Unrest" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ towards saving a world that, way more often than not, is uninterested in being saved from its own internal contradictions and ironies. A world going mad from simple things like vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and legumes:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Best job I ever had. :-)
But if the CIA came along and offered me a big grant to do publicly available FOSS Intelligence software and related content, would I ask my wife to do even more of the homeschooling and chicken care than she does already, or maybe even hire a multilingual tutor for some of the time and/or buy a toilet scrubbing robot? Probably. :-) How's that for ethics? :-) Would I rather such work was funded some other way? Sure. We tried a bit and failed with the NSF and NASA:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Maybe we did not try hard enough perhaps... I have to admire these Concord people for their success and doing stuff mostly the right way (at least, as right as you can be if focused mostly on the needs of compulsory schools):
http://www.concord.org/
Politics and FOSS can make strange bedfellows. A few years ago there was a slashdot story on someone doing FOSS who lost a military-related contract after he said he took military money because it meant one less cruise missile or something. But he was right in a way. Imagine what some FOSS developers could do with the time otherwise made available by the money tied up in just one Tomahawk cruise missile (US$6